Gladio and the war on de Gaulle.
On a August afternoon in 1962, gunmen raked the president of France with automatic fire on a Paris street. That much is history. The question this page grades is the one that hovers over it: how close, if at all, did NATO’s secret “stay-behind” network stand to the men who pulled the triggers.
The attack at Petit-Clamart was the work of the OAS — far-right French officers who saw de Gaulle’s move toward Algerian independence as treason. That is documented, and it inspired Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. Around that hard history sits a contested claim: that France’s NATO/CIA stay-behind apparatus (Operation Gladio) was tangled up in the anti-de-Gaulle terror. We report the spine as FACT and grade the Gladio link SOME SMOKE — showing both the evidence for it and the scholars who dispute it.
What this page is about
On August 22, 1962, a team led by air-force officer Jean Bastien-Thiry ambushed Charles de Gaulle’s motorcade at Petit-Clamart, outside Paris, firing well over a hundred rounds at his Citroën DS. De Gaulle survived unhurt; Bastien-Thiry was caught, tried, and executed in March 1963. The gunmen belonged to the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), the far-right underground of officers and settlers who regarded de Gaulle’s path to Algerian independence as a betrayal. The plot became the template for Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal.
Four years later, in 1966, de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO’s integrated military command and expelled the alliance’s headquarters from French soil — the sharpest Western rupture with NATO of the Cold War. That sequence — assassination attempts by the pro-NATO far right, then a president breaking with NATO — is the soil in which a harder claim grew: that NATO’s clandestine stay-behind network, later exposed as Operation Gladio, was entangled with the men who wanted de Gaulle dead. This page grades the spine and the claim separately.
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The record, in order
Every dated event on this page, assembled chronologically. The page may cover events in a different order for the narrative; this is the straight timeline.
- Feb 1961The OAS was a far-right underground of French officers and settlers who used terrorism to stop Algerian independence — and to kill de Gaulle.
- Aug 22, 1962On August 22, 1962, an OAS team ambushed de Gaulle’s motorcade at Petit-Clamart; he survived, and the plot’s leader was executed.
- Mar 7, 1966In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command and expelled NATO headquarters from French soil.
- 1971The Petit-Clamart plot was the direct inspiration for Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Day of the Jackal.’
- Nov 1990NATO’s clandestine ‘stay-behind’ networks, later known as Operation Gladio, existed across Western Europe — including France.
- 1992The claim that the French stay-behind network was entangled in the anti-de-Gaulle terror rests on Lacoste’s 1992 acknowledgment and Ganser’s book — and is disputed by intelligence historians.
The spine, and the contested thread
The first four entries are the documented spine — the OAS terror campaign, Petit-Clamart, the Jackal lineage, and de Gaulle’s 1966 break with NATO. The last two entries handle the stay-behind network: its documented existence, graded FACT, and its alleged entanglement with the anti-de-Gaulle terror, graded SOME SMOKE with the scholarly dispute shown in full.
The OAS was a far-right underground of French officers and settlers who used terrorism to stop Algerian independence — and to kill de Gaulle.
FACTThe Organisation armée secrète (OAS), founded in early 1961, waged a bombing and assassination campaign in France and Algeria against de Gaulle’s policy of Algerian self-determination. It grew out of the 1961 generals’ putsch in Algiers and drew on serving and cashiered army officers. Its explicit aims included the death of de Gaulle, whom it branded a traitor to French Algeria.
On August 22, 1962, an OAS team ambushed de Gaulle’s motorcade at Petit-Clamart; he survived, and the plot’s leader was executed.
FACTA commando led by Lt. Col. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry opened fire on de Gaulle’s Citroën DS at Petit-Clamart, southwest of Paris. More than a hundred rounds were fired; de Gaulle and his wife were unharmed. Bastien-Thiry was arrested, convicted of an attempt on the president’s life, and executed by firing squad on March 11, 1963 — the last person executed by that method in France.
The Petit-Clamart plot was the direct inspiration for Frederick Forsyth’s ‘The Day of the Jackal.’
FACTForsyth’s 1971 thriller opens with a fictionalized retelling of the Petit-Clamart attack and the execution of Bastien-Thiry, then imagines the OAS hiring a foreign professional assassin — ‘the Jackal’ — after its own plots fail. The novel’s premise is drawn directly from the real OAS campaign against de Gaulle.
In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command and expelled NATO headquarters from French soil.
FACTOn March 7, 1966, de Gaulle announced that France would leave NATO’s integrated military command while remaining a member of the alliance. All non-French NATO forces and the alliance’s headquarters were required to leave France; NATO’s political HQ moved from Paris to Brussels in 1967. France did not rejoin the integrated command until 2009. The rupture is documented in NATO’s own institutional history.
NATO’s clandestine ‘stay-behind’ networks, later known as Operation Gladio, existed across Western Europe — including France.
FACTBeginning in the late 1940s, Western intelligence services, coordinated with NATO and the CIA, built secret ‘stay-behind’ networks meant to activate as resistance cells in the event of a Soviet invasion. Their existence was publicly confirmed in November 1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed Italy’s network, codenamed Gladio, triggering parliamentary inquiries across Europe. France ran its own stay-behind arrangements under its external intelligence service. The existence of these networks is documented; what individual national cells actually did is far less clear.
The claim that the French stay-behind network was entangled in the anti-de-Gaulle terror rests on Lacoste’s 1992 acknowledgment and Ganser’s book — and is disputed by intelligence historians.
SOME SMOKEThe load-bearing evidence is an admission by Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former director of France’s DGSE, who in a 1992 interview with The Nation acknowledged that certain elements of the stay-behind network had been involved in terrorist activity against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. The claim reaches a broad audience mainly through Daniele Ganser’s 2005 book NATO’s Secret Armies. But whether the stay-behind network as such — as opposed to individual officers who also happened to join the OAS — was actually directed against de Gaulle is unproven, and Ganser’s book is sharply criticized by intelligence historians. We grade this SOME SMOKE: a real, sourced, actively contested thread, not an established fact.
“Certain elements of the [stay-behind] network were involved in terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. — Admiral Pierre Lacoste, as reported (1992)”
- Wikipedia: Pierre Lacoste (former DGSE director; 1992 Nation interview)
- Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies (Routledge, 2005) — the popular source for the link
- PUSHBACK — ‘Stay-Behind’ in France: Much ado about nothing? (Journal of Strategic Studies)
- PUSHBACK — ‘Falling Flat on the Stay-Behinds’: critical review of Ganser (Int’l Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 2006)
- Context on Ganser’s disputed reliability (later lost his university post over 9/11 claims)
What’s documented, and where the smoke starts
- The OAS tried to kill de Gaulle. That is fact. Petit-Clamart happened; Bastien-Thiry was executed; the plot seeded The Day of the Jackal. None of this requires Gladio to be true. The anti-de-Gaulle terror stands on its own documented record.
- De Gaulle really did break with NATO. The 1966 withdrawal from the integrated command is in NATO’s own history. It is the fact that gives the Gladio theory its narrative pull — a president who defied NATO, targeted by the pro-Western far right — but a motive is not a mechanism.
- The stay-behind networks existed. After Andreotti’s 1990 disclosure, no serious account denies that NATO-linked stay-behind cells were built across Western Europe, France included. Existence is settled. Conduct is not.
- The link to the anti-de-Gaulle terror is where the record thins. It rests on Lacoste’s general 1992 acknowledgment and on Ganser’s much-criticized book. Historians have pushed back hard — one article on the French network is titled “Much ado about nothing?” We show both the acknowledgment and the rebuttal, and we stop short of asserting a directed Gladio operation against de Gaulle, because the evidence stops short of it too.
A test case for grading suspicion honestly
The Dulles Blueprint is about a national-security apparatus that outlasted the elected leaders who tried to rein it in. De Gaulle is a genuine data point in that story: a head of state who defied NATO and was hunted by the pro-Western far right. That makes the Gladio theory tempting — and exactly the kind of claim that must be graded, not swallowed. The honest verdict is a split one: the OAS terror and the NATO rupture are FACT; the stay-behind network’s entanglement in the anti-de-Gaulle terror is SOME SMOKE, resting on a real acknowledgment and a contested book. Holding those two gradings apart — refusing to let a documented motive stand in for a proven operation — is the whole discipline this site exists to keep. It sits alongside the wider record in CIA Crimes and the Dulles Blueprint hub.
Questions worth taking seriously
Did Operation Gladio try to assassinate de Gaulle?
No — not on the documented record. The Petit-Clamart attack and the wider anti-de-Gaulle campaign were the work of the OAS, the far-right French underground. What is alleged, and graded SOME SMOKE here, is a narrower thing: that some elements of the NATO-linked stay-behind network became entangled with that terror. A former DGSE director acknowledged as much in 1992, but a directed Gladio operation against de Gaulle is not established.
Why cite Ganser's book if it's so criticized?
Because it is the main popular source for the Gladio–de Gaulle link, and readers deserve to see where the claim comes from. We cite it and immediately cite the historians who dispute it — including an article on the French network titled “Much ado about nothing?” and a critical review of Ganser, “Falling Flat on the Stay-Behinds.” Showing the source and its rebuttal is how a SOME SMOKE grade is supposed to work.
Was 'The Day of the Jackal' based on a real plot?
Yes. Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel opens with a fictionalized version of the real Petit-Clamart ambush and the execution of Bastien-Thiry, then invents the OAS hiring a foreign assassin after its own plots fail. The premise is drawn straight from the OAS’s actual campaign against de Gaulle.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Britannica — Secret Army Organization (OAS)
- Britannica — Algerian War
- Britannica — Charles de Gaulle (assassination attempts; NATO)
- Britannica — The Day of the Jackal (Forsyth)
- NATO — A short history of NATO (France and the integrated command)
- Wikipedia — Operation Gladio (stay-behind networks; 1990 disclosure)
- Wikipédia (fr) — Stay-behind en France
- Wikipedia — Pierre Lacoste (former DGSE director; 1992 Nation interview)
- Daniele Ganser — NATO’s Secret Armies (Routledge, 2005)
- Journal of Strategic Studies — “Stay-Behind” in France: Much ado about nothing?
- Int’l Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence — “Falling Flat on the Stay-Behinds” (review of Ganser)
- Wikipedia — Daniele Ganser (disputed reliability)